Terminal Tip: Four ways to turn off Finder animations and speed up your system

Mac OS X Hints has posted several ways to disable Finder animations like the snap-to-grid animation and the Info window opening animation. They are:

1. Disable standard Finder animations.
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

2. Disable 'snap to grid'.
defaults Write com.apple.Finder AnimateSnapToGrid -bool FALSE

3. Disable Info pane animations
defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateInfoPanes -bool false

4. Disable slow-mo animations (seen when you press Shift during Exposé launches or window minimization)
defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableSlowAnimation -bool true

Issue any or all of these at the command line, and then restart Finder. (Enter killall "Finder" at the command line.) To reverse these effects, change from true to false or false to true and restart Finder again. So did this make my creaky 733 G4 Power PC Mac run faster? Perhaps a little. The biggest changes in speed I noticed were in accessing folders from the dock.

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Source: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200507051557278…

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Mac OS X Hints has posted several ways to disable Finder animations like the snap-to-grid animation and the Info window opening animation....

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iDarbert

Apple should let users disable the animations from System/Finder Preferences, a-la Windows Control Panel.

May 27 2007 at 9:01 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Drew Lustro

This tip is retarded.

May 22 2007 at 3:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

da4

TinkerTool will give you a GUI to disable most of these effects - made 10.4 usable on a Pismo 400mhz (meaning, less slow).

May 22 2007 at 12:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Paulpro

If you want to speed up performance of the Finder and other apps, use ShadowKiller from Unsanity. Removing shadows from all windows tends to make a big difference in the perceived responsiveness of your system.

http://unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller

It's a Universal binary, so it will run on both PPC and Intel Macs.

May 22 2007 at 11:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jason

Really Derek? Are you sure? Oh wait your uninformed and apply your thoughts to everyone else.

How about those who use vnc over SSH tunneling, with all the ssh compression and VNC settings these tips help alot with VNC speed.

Another tip is to use Nocturne from the Quicksilver author to drop all colors for us that have the latest macs and plenty of RAM

To each his/her own

May 22 2007 at 11:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kostas

Nice tips, especially the one with the slow-mo animations. I have a shortcut conflict with the combination Shift + F11 when I work with Quark XPress. In Quark this is the shortcut to the Style Sheets panel but it's not functionable in Tiger because of Expose. Sadly I tried the command line that you suggest but it didn't desable it. I can't figure out why...

May 22 2007 at 9:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Fernando

I need a new Mac...

May 21 2007 at 10:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

derek

if you need to disable this stuff to speed up finder.. you either need more RAM or a new Mac

May 21 2007 at 8:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kevin Little

Thanks these tips sped up my system more than expected.

May 21 2007 at 8:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply